When you start to work on building your vocabulary, it’s really important to have fun. Having a great vocabulary, and constantly building it, is something that can be a very beneficial habit rather than a chore.

Here are our top ten suggestions for ways to build your vocabulary enjoyably: 

1. Find things you enjoy reading. Read widely, perhaps trying out reading material that is in a different style than you would normally pick. But dont force yourself to read material that genuinely bores you.
2. Look out for new words as you read. Make a game of guessing at their meaning, then looking them up to see if you were right. You can learn a lot about a word from the context in which it is used, but its important to make sure you get the correct definition as well.
3. Listen out for new words when people speak. Remember them and look them up later. Or better still, ask when you dont know what they mean. Most people will love to share their knowledge and will think better of you for wanting to learn than if you just pretend to understand.
4. Use one of the powerful software products available today to train yourself in important vocabulary power words in a fraction of the time it would take you by more old-fashioned means.
5. When you learn a new word, find an opportunity to practice it as soon as possible. If you dont find a conversation to use it in, how about using it in an email to a friend? Or you could even just use it when you talk to yourself!
6. Circle or highlight words in your dictionary the next time you happen to visit that page youll be unconsciously reviewing the word you learned last time.
7. Subscribe to a word of the day service be sure to use your new word the same day. Share it with a friend whenever you can.
8. Try out new word games, and find friends to play them with regularly.
9. Be goal oriented have specific targets to hit as you build your vocabulary, and be sure to reward yourself when you achieve them.
10. Use your imagination when you learn a new word, play with it and bring it to life in your mind. This is how children learn and you can do the same. It will help you remember your new words almost effortlessly.

Transcript:

Neil: Hello and welcome to The English We Speak from BBC Learning English. I’m Neil. Presenting the programme with me today is Li. She hasn’t arrived at the studio yet and I must say that I’m a bit nervous about her arrival. Something’s happened to her recently… she’s so unfriendly and even frightening. A real dragon!

Li: (Bursts into the studio) What are you saying? Why Neil, why are you not waiting for me? This guy, honestly… right, come on. I haven’t got all day. Give me the script… (reads a bit out) Ahh hello, I’m Li… blah, blah, blah… this is rubbish asusual.

Neil: Li, what’s the matter with you?

Li: What do you mean? Can we get on with this please?

Neil: What a dragon!

Li: What did you say?

Neil: I said that you’re a dragon, Li.

Li: No I’m not, I’m a rooster.

Neil: No, I’m not talking about your Chinese zodiac sign, I mean your personality.

Li: Oh! Oh, thanks!

Neil: What?

Li: I said thank you.

Neil: Li, I called you a dragon. That’s not a compliment.

Li: Neil called me a dragon. To us Chinese this is a great compliment, but he says it’s not. I wonder what he means…

Neil: Listen to these examples and see if you can get the meaning

Examples

A: I’m never going to make my deadline with this report.

B: You should speak to Kate to get an extension.

A: But I’m too scared of Kate – she’s such a dragon.

B: That’s true. She’s so unfriendly and scary. She’ll probably shout at you.

A: (coughing)

B: Oh that doesn’t sound good. You should go to the Doctor’s.

A: I can’t face dealing with that dragon at reception. She’s always so rude and aggressive.

B: Yeah, she’s the last thing you want to deal with when you’re ill.

Li: Ah, now I see that to call someone a dragon in English means something very different to Chinese. In those examples we have just heard they were using it to describe unfriendly and frightening women. Can this be right? Neil, are you calling me unfriendly and scary?

Neil: Erm… yes. Recently.

Li: Not strong, courageous and determined? This is what we mean in Chinese when we call someone a dragon.

Neil: No, I’m afraid not. We use ‘dragon’ to describe a woman who is unfriendly and frightening.

Li: Oh, that’s very interesting.

Neil: Yes it is, isn’t it?

Li: Hang on, hang on. What do you mean I’m unfriendly? How dare you call me unfriendly!

Neil: Well, not usually but recently you have been.

Li: You just wait. I will get my revenge on you for this, you little upstart. Who do you think you are?

Neil: Now you’re getting scary!

Li: I’ll show you what a dragon can do!

Neil: OK, Li I think I’m going to leave now before you start breathing fire.

Li: Breathing fire!? I’ll burn you till you’re toast!

Use fewer with objects that can be counted one-by-one.

Use less with qualities or quantities that cannot be individually counted.

Incorrect: There were less days below freezing last winter.

Correct: There were fewer days below freezing last winter.
(Days can be counted.)

Correct: I drank less water than she did.
(Water cannot be counted individually here.)

When referring to time or money, less is normally used even with numbers. Specific units of time or money use fewer only in cases where individual items are referred to.

Examples: I have less than an hour to do this work.

I have less time to do this work.

I have less money than I need.

I have less than twenty dollars.

He worked fewer hours than I did.

The only occasion in which you might say, “I have fewer than twenty dollars,” would be when you were talking about specific dollar bills or coins, such as “I have fewer than twenty silver dollars in my collection.”

Spook [the prisoner]: Have you ever eaten squid fried?

Turnkey [the guard]: Yes.

Spook: How was it?

Turnkey: Better than when I was sober.

The study of linguistics is not a laughing matter — unless you happen to have Stan Dubinsky as your professor. The University of South Carolina linguist has been sharing jokes and puns and cartoons with students for more than 20 years as a way of helping them understand complex concepts about the science of language.

Using cartoons like the one above, which features the ambiguous use of the word “fried” (referring either to Turnkey’s having been drunk or to a way of cooking squid), Dubinsky is able to clearly explain how the structure of a sentence can alter its meaning. Seeing students’ amusement and satisfaction when they get the joke and the concept has kept him clipping cartoons for decades.

Dubinsky is particularly enamored of humor that involves play on words, sounds or grammar. Over the course of years teaching undergraduate linguistics he came to realize that the comic strips and panels he enjoyed so much were a wonderful teaching tool for a subject that he says can “sometimes rival physics or chemistry in detail and difficulty.”

“Cartoons and jokes are very useful as a teaching tool,” Dubinsky said. “Students love it when you present them with something amusing that also illustrates a main point in the lecture. In this respect, language-based humor turns out to be a great way to illustrate difficult-to-grasp linguistic concepts.”

Once he realized that cartoons offered such linguistic gems, Dubinsky began perusing newspaper cartoon sections.

“I became an obsessive cartoon reader,” said Dubinsky. “I perused the cartoon section of The State newspaper every day on the chance that there might be a cartoon I could use. Sometimes I would find two cartoons in a one day or sometimes not find one cartoon in two weeks. Gradually, though, my cartoon collection became enormous, and part of my regular teaching preparation was picking out the comic strips that would work in class.”

Dubinsky said some of his best finds came from the comic strips Shoe, Dilbert, Mother Goose and Grimm, B.C. and, of course, The Wizard of Id.

Cambridge Press thought Dubinsky’s approach to explaining the workings of language through humor was an idea worth sharing. As a result, linguistic students and lovers of language everywhere can benefit from Dubinsky’s favorite cartoons and his humor-inspired teaching techniques, without taking his class.

With research assistance from Hannah Peace, a USC Honors College alumna, Dubinsky and USC rhetoric professor Christopher Holcombe, co-wrote the book, “Understanding Language through Humor,” which was released by Cambridge late last fall.

Much like Dubinsky’s use of cartoons to supplement his lectures, the book provides students with entertaining examples in very plain language to supplement linguistic textbooks. Each chapter begins with an illustrated cartoon and features more than a dozen jokes, many from comic strips. They also use carefully selected bits of humor to explain a particular aspect of linguistics, such that a reader can come out with a fairly comprehensive understanding of the field.

See:

1. Blond or Blonde

2. The Blond Stereotype

ubiq·ui·tous \yü-ˈbi-kwə-təs\

existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly

The company’s advertisements are ubiquitous.

• <by that time cell phones had become ubiquitous, and people had long ceased to be impressed by the sight of one>
• Hot dogs are the ideal road trip food—inexpensive, portable, ubiquitous. —Paul Lucas, Saveur, June/July 2008

First Known Use: 1830

I eventually sliced it open, and as is the case with most tropical fruit, I decided I preferred apples. They are apparently pretty popular, though and work okay in fruit salads.

9. Dragon Fruit
Also known as Pitaya, the dragon fruit lives up to its name in appearance. From the outside, it looks like a decorative modern art flame, and on the inside, well, that is what I figured a dragon must look like on the inside. They originally come from Mexico and New Mexico, but are pretty popular in the eastern world now and grown heavily in the islands of Indonesia, up across South East Asia, in Australia and even as far as Israel.

It is the fruit of a cactus, and is described as having a very watermelon like taste, despite looking like vanilla ice cream studded with dead fruit flies.

8. Durian
Ahh, durian. Alternately known as “The King of Fruit” and “The fruit that smells like rotting garbage and onions.” My favorite description is from Richard Sterling and quoted on Wikipedia as this:

“Its odor is best described as pig-sh*t, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away.”

The same page also mentions that they have also been described as smelling like civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs. Yum.  Some people are absolutely in love with it, and apparently a variety of animals including tigers can’t get enough of stale vomit encased in a fruity hedgehog, but the people in Singapore seem to have the right idea; the fruit is banned from all public transportation.

7. Buddha’s Hand
 Buddha’s hand is a citrus fruit with little real “fruit” to it, being mostly citron scented rind, in the form of awful looking yellow fingers. It is easily the most horrible looking thing bearing the name “Buddha” unless some sick bastard named a rotting carcass after Siddhartha.

People don’t generally eat them, because of the lack of actual fruit in it, but they use them to perfume rooms because they put out a pretty powerful citrusy fragrance, however since their pith (the bitter white part of the citrus peel) is actually not bitter, the “fingers” are sometimes cut off and used in fish dishes or salads.

6. Passion Fruit 
While passion fruits aren’t exactly rare these days, they still kind of freak me out, and they are odd looking. They are originally South American and the skins have been shown to contain trace amounts of cyanogenic glycosides, which is to say microscopic amounts of really nasty poison, but then again so do apple seeds, so don’t sweat it.

People are almost as psycho about passion fruit as they are durian, although not smelling like a corpse suggests that they may be on to something. Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Guess how the Passion Fruit got its name? Well, before the fruit was named, the flower was called the “Passion Flower”. Do the flower and fruit inspire lust? Do they keep couples together through tough times? Or rather, did the flowers remind the first Europeans to discover them think of Jesus being tortured (the Passion)and named them after that? Hint, it had nothing to do with love.

5. Screw Pine
I love anything where the name could get a kid in trouble for saying it in school, which includes the word “screw” and anything that sounds like “ass.” Screw pines also go by the more boring name of Pandanus… okay, so “Panda anus” is a winner too. The fruit is used for everything from dyes to food. Not the most exciting thing on the list, but it certainly has the most fun name.

 

4. Rambutan
I’ll be honest with you; rambutan reminds me of a vegetarian testicle. Sorry for that, but I aim for honesty in my writing and it looks like some weird critter from Australia carries them around to make babies and possibly drink from. It hails from Southeast Asia and is popular for jams and jellies, and the mildly poisonous seeds are sometimes roasted and eaten (roasting them apparently makes them safe).

3. Akebia Quinata
 These fruit look like they are just as likely to eat you as you are it. The sausage shaped pods are filled with edible goo that looks like it should be bursting with flies, but they come from chocolate scented flowers, which means they may not be half bad. The stem of the plant is used as a diuretic because it contains 30% potassium salts, and New Zealand has banned the sale of the plant because it is apparently a virulent pest that likes to squeeze out competing flora.

2. Atemoya
 Atemoya are a hybrid made from Sugar Apples and Cherimoya. Much like the durian, they look like you could shove it onto the end of a stick and smite foes with them, but they are actually smooth and soft like the sherimoya. They are described as tasting like a pina colada with vanilla, which actually sounds quite delightful. Oh, and because nothing tropical seems to be without a horrific dark side, the seeds are inedible and poisonous. Also, the flowers have a weird behavior; from 2 to 4 PM, they are female, and on alternating days, from 3 to 5 they are male. This fruit is a lot like Cillian Murphy in Peacock.

1. Snakeskin Fruit 

Some fruit names are deceptive; Breadfruit tastes nothing like bread, and road apples couldn’t look less like a road if they tried. (They taste awful, too.) This one pretty much hits the nail on the head. I will take my vegetable matter without disturbing scales, thank you very much. Pinching the end of the fruit causes the skin to slough off, and the pieces of fruit resemble garlic. The flavor is described as sweet and acidic, that is if you can get past the fact that it looks like garlic from the plant the lizard people in V came from.